Episode 3: The Importance of the Detective Novel

The Literary Life Podcast

Today’s Book List:

(affiliate links)

• The World’s Last Night and Lilies That Fester by C.S. Lewis
• The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
• Nancy Drew #45: The Spider Sapphire Mystery by Carolyn Keene
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald Knox
• Multiple novels by Agatha Christie
• Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Moonstone and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
• The Albert Campion series by Margery Allingham
• The Roderick Alleyn series by Ngaio Marsh
• The Flavia de Luce series by Allen Bradley
• The Inspector Appleby Mystery series by Michael Innes
• The Daughter of Time and Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey
• Murder Fantastical by Patricia Moyes
• The Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
• Multiple novels by Alexander McCall Smith
• Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series by Laurie King
• The Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny
• Brave New World by David Archer
• The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters
• The Adam Dalgliesh Series by P.D. James

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Today’s poem:

The Listeners by Walter De La Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.